Spring haiku

Soft May flower moon 

 

floating among all of those 

 

generator stacks

A trip to Green-Wood Cemetery

Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is interesting for several reasons including: for being a rare large green area in Brooklyn, just slightly smaller than Prospect Park and close to it; for its dramatic landscaping; and for the famous people buried there. 

I went to visit the grave of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. I've been a fan of his music since I saw the ballet Great Galloping Gottschalk which features his music. I've written about it on this blog before - fifteen years ago now. Wow.

Here is the Gottschalk monument with the "Angel of Music" statue which was unveiled in 2012, created to replace the original statue that was vandalized sometime in the 1950s. They clearly didn't replace the actual monument used as a pedestal for the statue, since much of the text was worn away and you could barely make out Gottschalk's name. It's odd that Gottschalk is buried in Brooklyn - he was from New Orleans and he died in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe Green-Wood was the place to be buried if you were rich and famous in those days. They also have Tiffany, Currier and Ives, Boss Tweed and Horace Greeley, among many others.

Gottschalk played for Lincoln at the White House, including his "Union!" which I plan to use in my production of GETTING RIGHT WITH LINCOLN if I ever get that together.

I'm glad they replaced the Gottschalk angel although they certainly aren't lacking for angels at Green-Wood, the place is lousy with angels.

Green-Wood is also very hilly, far more hilly than you would expect given how flat most of Brooklyn is. 

It's so elevated in places you can see across the Brooklyn rooftops all the way to the Statue of Liberty. That was a cool discovery.

John & Yoko & Paul & Francine

So I got the just-published John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie and read the whole thing in the past 24 hours.

I like it, although since I've been reading about the Beatles since I was a teen-ager, there's not a lot I haven't read before and this book is no exception. I've already mentioned the bit about Lennon & McCartney dropping acid and staring into each other's eyes, that was a new. 

And I hadn't heard about the island scheme:

In the summer of 1967, Lennon initiated... a trip to Greece to explore the possibility of buying an island where they all could live...

They found an island but:

The truth is that it was a fantasy of John's which Paul merely entertained. Marianne Faithfull, recalling John's enthusiasm for the Greek project, gave an explanation for its failure that is both funny and perceptive: "the last thing Paul wanted to do was live on some fucking island."

The book does use Francine Schwartz's memoir Body Count, about her brief time as Paul's girlfriend, as a source. I had promised to write about the book three and a half years ago. I'm finally doing it.

An interesting aspect of the Ian Leslie book is that he constantly emphasizes how jealous and insecure both John and Paul were of each other's work - John was apparently obsessed with the success of Paul's "Yesterday." And each also resented when the other prioritized someone else over himself.

Based on the book, I'd say that John was even more inclined to insecurity and jealousy and resentment than Paul, but I had had the impression, after reading Francine's book, that Paul was the most insecure and jealous and resentful, especially after reading about the letter incident. One of the most interesting aspects of Francine Schwartz's relationship with Paul was how much time she spent with John and Yoko. She really liked Yoko:

One consolation: Yoko Ono Lennon. She and John moved in with us while their story was still something to hide. As the two of us cooked breakfast for our respective men, she'd rap with a kind of new, feminine wisdom about how hard it was to make them happy. She was fighting her own battle staying sane amidst racist attacks from the Apple cock-and-cunt garden. She was also opening up her wealth of strength and determination to John. All the same, she confided in me that she didn’t believe any relationship could last more than seven years.

John, Yoko and I would watch the “telly” through the evenings when Paul was out raving and drinking and getting it up for God knows who. The three of us felt young and weird and relaxed, and talked about how we could save the company (Apple Corps) if only it could change direction, motivation. | was amazed that John never said a bad word about Paul’s management capabilities. Especially when Paul put thumbs down on Two Virgins.

Yoko made opium cookies one night, and the three of us sat staring at each other, waiting for something to happen. It never did, but that was one time when John read through my giggle to the sadness of waiting up for Paul.

“What are you worried about? Someone had to get the scissors, and it was Her,” he remarked.

If there had been something John and Yoko could do to help me get Paul’s head straightened out, they surely would have done it. I asked John why Paul didn’t do a solo album. It would've seemed the logical outlet for all the ego crap he was laying down at the studio. John half laughed and said, “We thought of it a long time ago. It was going to be called Paul McCartney Goes Too Far. But he wouldn't do it. He’s too hung up about us bein’ Beatles, y know.” 

John obviously loved Paul enough to let him run wild if it would help ease the tension Paul was creating in the studio and at home. Yoko could see it, too.

But Paul was treating them like shit too. He even sent them a hate letter once, unsigned, typed. I brought it in with the morning mail. Paul put most of the fan mail in a big basket, and let it sit for weeks, but John and Yoko opened every piece. When they got to the anonymous note, they sat puzzled, looking at each other with genuine pain in their eyes. “You and your jap tart think you're hot shit,” it said. John put it on the mantle, and in the afternoon, Paul bopped in, prancing much the same self-conscious way he did when we met.

“I just did that for a lark .. .” he said, in his most sugar-coated accent.

it was embarrassing. The three of us swiveled around, staring at him. You could see the pain in John, Yoko simply rose above it, feeling only empathy for John.

I have no idea what "Someone had to get the scissors" means.

There are lots of Beatles outtakes online now, even videos and I found one that show's Francine hanging out with Paul while he works on "Mother Nature's Son" and "Blackbird." Francine shows up at minute 3:17.

MURDERBOT TRAILER!

This Murderbot production on AppleTV+ is so of the zeitgeist. The part where Murderbot says "and humans are idiots" is exactly what so many people felt seeing the majority of American voters deliberately choose stupidity and evil in November 2024.

And "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon" looks amazing!

But my favorite part is Ratthi saying: "I mean, that's what it calls itself so I am just being respectful." Yes I LOLd.

  

  

Stills from Murderbot in Vanity Fair

It looks great! 

Coming May 16!

The casting of the character Ratthi - shown here about to hug the anti-hug Murderbot - is perfect.

I think they removed the character Overse though, which makes me sad.

Carmina Burana - WTF?

Well I have just found the most goofy version ever of Carmina Burana. 

It's a 1975 video of a production by French director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.

It's like a cross between a painting by Hieronymus Bosch and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Probably my favorite moment is their rendition of "Were diu werlt alle min" - in English "Were all the world mine" a song that expresses an obsession with the Queen of England, supposedly Eleanor of Aquitaine.

It goes, in Middle High German:

Were diu werlt alle min

von dem mere unze an den Rin,

des wolt ih mih darben,

daz diu chünegin von Engellant

lege an minen armen.

Translation:

Were all the world mine

from the sea to the Rhine,

I would give it all up

to have the queen of England

lie in my arms.

In the production the "queen of England" is apparently in one of those carnival dunking booths. The best part, she has a sign that says "chünegin von Engellant" (queen of England) on it. I like it when she twirls her braids.

  

Hell yeah I pre-ordered John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

Look, I love George and Ringo too, even though George could be such a buzzkill.

But for me the most important aspect of the Beatles has always been the Lennon-McCartney partnership.

From the Guardian:

It’s a drag, isn’t it,” Paul McCartney told reporters quizzing him the day after John Lennon’s murder, a soundbite as dispiritingly muted, even callous, as his reaction to his mother’s death when he was 14: “How are we going to get by without her money?” Behind the scenes, Paul was lost and tearful, as well as guilt‑stricken that he and John hadn’t properly reconciled since the Beatles split: “I’m never going to fall out with anybody again.” Still, the enshrinement of John and vilification of Paul had begun. “John Lennon was three-quarters of the Beatles,” Philip Norman told television viewers while promoting his biography, Shout!, a few months later.

The antagonism has abated in recent years, but the John-Paul duality persists. Heavy rocker versus cute populist. Working-class rebel v smug bourgeois clone. Tormented genius v girly sentimentalist. Strawberry Fields Forever v Penny Lane.

Ian Leslie takes on these tired polarities by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: “passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy”. However much at odds temperamentally, John and Paul were an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Beatles, with George and Ringo (not much featured here) as add-ons. The emotional ties they shared, not least the early loss of their mothers, weren’t ones they could talk about, so they sang them instead. As Paul put it: “You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people.”

Although I believe the enshrinement of John as a tormented genius and vilification of Paul as girly sentimentalist predated Lennon's murder by at least ten years.

If these newspaper reviews are any indication, the book has lots of stuff I never knew about before.

New York Times review:

I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains. There is a passage about them being high on LSD, after recording the song “Getting Better” during the “Sgt. Pepper’s” sessions, that seems to me central to Leslie’s understanding of his subjects:

That night, John and Paul did something that the two of them practiced quite a few times during this period: They gazed intensely into each other’s eyes. They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other, almost obliterating any sense of themselves as distinct individuals. “There’s something disturbing about it,” recalled McCartney, much later, in his understated way. “You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t.”

Los Angeles Times review:

“ ‘Yesterday’ feels like a shift in the balance of power,” says Leslie. “From the beginning they were equals, and ‘Yesterday’ wasn’t only just a hit, but the song that more artists covered than any other Beatles song. Paul even sang it onstage by himself when they performed. And it triggered John’s insecurities.” 

 

A further separation occurred in 1967 when Lennon, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, moved out of London into the suburbs while McCartney stayed behind, soaking in the beau monde of the city’s arts scene. Leslie also writes of Lennon’s use of LSD and McCartney’s reluctance to follow suit. “They weren’t living near each other anymore and songwriting became more like a job with set hours,” says Leslie. But “even as they were starting to drift apart, the songs were still astonishing.” 

 

One-upmanship between the partners became a spur for Lennon to try harder, with McCartney responding in kind. When Lennon presented McCartney with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a woozy reverie loosely based on his childhood, McCartney wrote his own memory piece, “Penny Lane.” Lennon wrote “Imagine” a year after the Beatles broke up and thought he may have finally topped McCartney. “When he played it for people to get feedback, the question he asked was, ‘Is it better than ‘Yesterday?,’ ” says Leslie.

I always thought it was the Sgt. Peppers album that changed the balance of power, with McCartney pushing the band to get it done. Meanwhile Lennon, according to the interview by Maureen Cleave (which contains the infamous "bigger than Jesus" quote):

He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. "Physically lazy," he said. "I don't mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more."

And Ringo attests to the Paul-driven dynamic in this video clip.

One of my ambitions is to find THE most perfect photo of John and Paul together, preferably playing music. This one is my favorite so far, although it would be better if you could see all of their faces.

Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon

I've mentioned musician Jackson Browne a few times over the course of this blog - this blog which will be twenty-freaking years old in November! It seems like just yesterday it was a mere ten years old.

I knew that Jackson Browne was an important career and personal support for Warren Zevon - I wrote about that back in 2014.

But I only just found out about this Dutch radio recording of Browne and Zevon playing and singing together, available on the Internet Archive for free. It's known as "The Offender Meets The Pretender."

I've recently gotten into Warren Zevon. I've enjoyed his songs over the years, and went to bat against a college radio station in Philadelphia, back in the 1990s because they were bowdlerizing "Lawyers Guns and Money," cutting out the line "the shit has hit the fan" when they played it. Because of the word "shit." 

But I've discovered additional Zevon cuts lately, like Desperados under the Eaves, which has Zevon's musical impression of an air conditioner that is amazingly soulful and affecting.

I've rediscovered "Tenderness on the Block" released in 1978 - it's not on "Offender/Pretender" - but it is on YouTube -  it's hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote cynical and gory songs like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, Werewolves of London and Excitable Boy (discussed in this droll Paste article "Profoundly Horrifying Song Lyrics: “Excitable Boy” by Warren Zevon.") When I hear these lines from Tenderness:

Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight?
Trying to run before she can walk, that's right
She's growing up, she has a young man waiting...

I almost expect the next line to be - 

And he's gonna dig up her grave and build a cage with her bones

But this girl won't get caught by the Excitable Boy because:

She was wide-eyed, now she's street-wise

To the lies and the jive talk

But she'll find true love

And tenderness on the block

UPDATE: he co-wrote this with Jackson Browne so that makes more sense.

What's truly horrifying to me is that any teenager Zevon might have been singing about in 1978 is in her sixties now. 

Zevon didn't make it to his sixties, dying at age 56 - not from liquor or drugs (although he abused those for much of his life) or a car crash, but from mesothelioma.

Enjoy.

Orchid update ~ eight flowers

Although it's hard to see there are eight. But there are, trust me.

CLOSEUP!

LE CHAT NOIR ~ en francais

Well I finally have a French translation of my play LE CHAT NOIR that I like and I got a bunch of francophone actors to perform it on Zoom this past week. What an experience. It was so weird but fun to hear the whole thing in French. 

And it was so appropriate since, as I just found out, this week is la semaine de la langue français et de la francophonie. That is to say, the French government is, from March 15 - 23, celebrating the French language and French-speakers, which includes those outside of France.

By chance, the French speakers I assembled for the Zoom reading included a Ukrainian, a Franco-Turk, two French people from the south of France, a Quebecois and me, because I decided to play the role of Madeline Valadon, the mother of Suzanne Valadon. Only because she does not have a lot of lines and I practiced her lines night and day for a month. 

And I still couldn't quite get some words right. I practiced with Microsoft Word, which has a dictation feature - you speak and Word transcribes what you say onto a document. And you can do it in lots of different languages, including French.

So I practiced saying the words with Microsoft Word and watched how it was transcribed. I got pretty good after a while but there were some words that were incredibly difficult to pass off to Word as if a French-speaker was talking. Words like "scélérat" (scoundrel), "pour louer" - which means "to rent for" but Word kept thinking I was saying "polluer" which means "to pollute." And "meule" which means "millstone" and it's sort of pronounced "mew-lah" but Word though I was saying, at various times, "mur" (wall), "mûle" (mule), "molle" (soft) and "nul" (zero, but also an insult along the lines of "loser.")

I did finally conquer "la fée vert" which means "the green fairy" - it's what people sometimes call absinthe, but I had to practice a million times before Word understood I was saying "fee" for fairy, instead of feuille (leaf) or fait (fact) or veille (the day before) Oh lah lah!

But worst of all is "love" - or "l'amour." Usually when I said the word it came out "la mort" which means death. And they are fairly distinct- "la mort" is like lah mehr, while l'amour is like lah-moor. I don't know why it took so long to get it right. And I have to get it right! French is the language of l'amour, not the language of la mort!

 

Michael row the boat ashore

There has always been something about the folk song "Michael row the boat ashore" that really gets to me. 

And that was before I knew it was originally a slave song that was "discovered" by white people during the Civil War and then published. Apparently it was pretty obscure for almost a hundred years until a friend of Pete Seeger rediscovered it. 

The version that really gets me is by Joe and Eddie  maybe because it was used during an important moment in the show "The Good Lord Bird." 

The first version I heard, by the Highwaymen also affects me, but the Joe and Eddie version makes me cry. And that was before I read that Joe Gilbert of Joe and Eddie died at the age of 23 in a car crash. 

On his now-defunct website, Eddie Brown writes:

After Joe’s tragic death, I worked as a single in L.A. and for a short while, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although I enjoyed performing, I found it frustrating to keep a band together and it was during this time I started writing, something I had never done before. Eventually I moved back to L.A., where I began to spend a lot of time in the studio, fortunately, with some of the greatest producers in popular music: Gene McDaniels, Louis Shelton, Richard Perry, Thom Bell, and Quincy Jones. I will be forever indebted to these wonderful, talented people. Because of them I found my next calling, writing and producing music.

I put the song in one of my plays, which will hopefully be produced one of these days.

Sprinter is here again

It's been three years since I celebrated Sprinter so it's about time.

I don't have any outdoor pictures handy but I do have an indoor image of a Sprinter afternoon shadow.

MURDERBOT'S A-COMING!

GO MURDERBOT GO!

Murderbot premieres May 16 with its first two episodes on Apple TV+. It will run 10 episodes total, with a weekly drop after the premiere through July 11. 

MORE ABOUT MURDERBOT

Orchid report: Six flowers

So we lost one flower from the first stem, but now the second stem has two flowers so now it's a net total of six flowers.

The latest orchid report: five flowers plus more...

OK! So now there are five flowers on the one stem, plus another stem where at least three more buds are about to open and I think the old stem from last year, which is still green, is planning to bud too - that would be cool.

Four flowers ~ orchidtacular

Orchid's progress ~ three flowers and a fourth on the way

Orchid's progress ~ two flowers

There are actually three stems now shooting out of this plant. The one with the two flowers, the one from last year which is still green, but doesn't look like it has any plans to sprout, and a brand new stem which looks like it will have flowers in about a month. Big excitement here at orchid central.

The other stem-like items are aerial roots. Apparently it's perfectly normal for orchids to have them.